Seeing your life through the lens of the gospels
John 6:41-51
1 Faith is reasonable but we cannot reason our way into faith. We have to be ‘drawn by the Father’. We have to be ‘taught by God’. What opens your mind and heart to God’s message?
2 One thing which closes our minds to what another is saying is when we label them disparagingly, as the Jews did to Jesus. Have you ever had the experience of being surprised by the wisdom of another when you laid aside your prejudices about her/him to listen to what s/he was saying?
3 ‘No one has ever seen the Father except the one who is from God’. As Jesus put a human face on God and God’s love, so God’s love for us today is mediated through one another. How have other people been sacraments of God’s love for you? For whom have you been that kind of a sacrament?
4 The way in which Jesus became a source of life for us was by giving himself. It is when we truly give ourselves that we can be life-giving to one another. If we do not give of ourselves, what do we have to offer? How have you discovered the importance of self-giving, in yourself or in others?
John Byrne OSA
Email john@orlagh.ie
Questions people ask
Q. I did a weekend programme called the Enneagram which I found very helpful in understanding myself and others. But now somebody tells me it is against our religion as it comes from a non-Christian source.
A. I also found the Enneagram very enlightening. The fact that it originated among Sufi (Islamic) mystics does not make it bad or dangerous. The Old Testament writers used pagan sources for their stories of creation and the flood. Jewish religious feasts were developed on the foundation of earlier pagan festivals. Similarly, Christians took the pagan celebration of mid-winter as the time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Saint Patrick referred the pagan fire of Spring to the rising of Christ. God’s presence is not confined to Christians!
Fr Silvester O’Flynn OFM Cap
Email silvesteroflynn@gmail.com
The Deep End
Difficult Word
Today we have another strange reading from Paul (Eph 4:30-5:2). He warns the Ephesians not ‘to grieve the Holy Spirit of God’ by bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander and malice. Instead they should be kind, tender-hearted and forgiving. That’s fine.
But then he describes Christ’s giving himself up for us, i.e., surrendering to death, as a ‘fragrant offering and sacrifice to God’. I find it difficult to grasp that Paul should consider the Spirit upset by human malice yet the Father pleased by his Son’s death in facing up to that malice. Why does malice aggrieve the Holy Spirit if not because of the damage it does to both victim and perpetrator? Why then does the suffering it inflicts on God’s Son not aggrieve that Spirit too? At least, if it does, Paul doesn’t say so.
Reading Paul one way gives the impression that the Father was pleased with both the suffering and the love that enabled Jesus to face his suffering and death. Reading him another way gives the impression, intended or not, that the Father wanted his Son to suffer on our behalf – hence the fragrance of the sacrifice. However, this seriously compromises God’s compassionate nature as revealed in the parable of the prodigal son. Then reading Paul a third way gives the impression that the fragrance is in Paul’s nostrils not the Father’s. If true, this simplifies matters. It’s Paul’s view of Jesus’ suffering and death, not God’s.
Scripture at times can be really difficult to understand, and the word of God it contains difficult to hear.
Fr Tom Cahill SVD, Divine Word Missionaries, Donamon, Co Roscommon
Email tomcee@svdireland.com
